An interview with Gary J. Hartung, Contact Center Solutions Architect, and Gary  W. Schmidt, Corporate Quality Assurance Process Leader

Company Snapshot
The CUNA Mutual Group is the world’s largest provider of financial services to Credit Unions and their members, offering lending, protection, financial, employee and member solutions through strategic partnerships, technological innovations and multiple service channels. The mutual insurers of the CUNA Mutual Group are owned by the policyholders and operate to serve their best interests. CUNA Mutual is headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin, with offices in 30 countries around the world, employing 5,500 employees worldwide. With annual revenues at over $2.6 billion, the CUNA Mutual Group has $14.6 billion in assets under management.

“NICE Perform gives us the analytical tools we didn’t have before; it gives us communication channels and real-time information, which was previously inconceivable.”

Some Results

• Evaluator efficiency increased by 40% over our previous version of NICE
• Average handle time for calls is down by 4%.”

 Please tell us about what CUNA Mutual does
“Our specialty is serving credit unions, but not only as businesses. We also provide outsourcing arrangements for marketing services and for call center activity. We offer a wide breadth of products across the spectrum of financial services to our customers (the credit unions)  and members (their customers). These include pension plan products to the credit union employees and down to the member level; disability and life insurance; and even brokerage operations, buying stocks, bonds, annuities, and so on.

“So we’re handling questions and requests for support with typical financial services, but with a different capacity since calls are coming in both from credit unions and from members who have purchased policies, for example.”

What was the situation in your contact centers before NICE Perform?
“CUNA Mutual is undergoing a three-year improvement plan that is intended to enhance the value we bring to our credit union customers. Our goal is to build a new CUNA Mutual - a company that is easier to do business with, is more customer focused, delivers best-in-class products, and world-class customer service. This means a major transformation of our contact centers.

“Previously we were organized around products. We had about thirty-seven contact centers and some three hundred 800 numbers, each handling different products.  Our whole cost structure, the way we dealt with our customers, our efficiency, needed to be fixed – to put it bluntly.

“We wanted to shift the focus to our customers; to be consistent in providing high-quality customer experiences; standardize and centralize support processes such as reporting, quality assurance, workforce management, and sales audits across multiple sites.”

Can you give us an example of what you mean by standardizing and centralizing?
“We needed to look at the total lifetime value of the customer and understand all the services the customer uses.

“The situation was that the same customer was being serviced by five different groups, different agents, in different contact centers, being transferred around from one to the next. We didn’t have the synergy and visibility across the customer.

“Furthermore, we wanted to be able to measure our success, how well we’re doing, contact center by contact center. This wasn’t easy, since each contact center had different ideas on how to handle customers over the phone, for example – how you answer the phone, put someone on hold, transfer the call, and so on.

“Our executives wanted us to determine how to best service our credit unions and their members. We needed to bring like groups together, servicing similar products under one roof. Instead of five different products being handled by five different contact centers, agents needed to learn how to service the customer across the different product lines. And they needed to do all this consistently.  This was a huge undertaking. It meant a radical change in our technologies and in so many of our processes.”

How did NICE help you with this huge undertaking?
“At first, we engaged NICE’s Consulting Services team which helped us with hands-on guidance. The consulting program included business process benchmarking to identify the strengths and weaknesses of our performance management processes and then mapping them to NICE Perform’s capabilities. They identified the key business needs and how we could address them with advanced analytics capabilities, including key-word spotting, emotion detection, and integration with CTI.

“And we’re pretty excited about this – because the analytics are actually helping us drive the transformation efforts by determining how our customers are actually being handled and why are they are being transferred to various sites.

“With NICE we can pull the identification of a customer, we can follow him or her through from center to center, and determine how many people have to deal with this customer, and why they’re doing the transfer.

“If it wasn’t for NICE Perform and NICE’s Consulting Services team, we would be nothing more than a traditional quality program which is only concerned with recording and evaluating calls. Today, we are much, much more.”

How does NICE Perform’s interaction analytics help with key business needs?
“The analytics are helping us save a huge amount of time in finding calls within our sales group that actually resulted in a sale. Being able to find those calls more efficiently and provide more specific and relevant coaching, has helped to increase evaluator productivity, which has a direct impact on sales. Using key words helps us hone in on the very specific words which alert a sale.

“An example is the ‘perimed exam.’ This is an examination that members need to go through before they can qualify for an insurance program, for example.  NICE Perform detects it beautifully. Any time it’s said, it’s a sale for sure, because it is only mentioned once the sale is closed.

“Other words and phrases include: sales, offer sheet, and business card – which is what the agent sends with each offer sheet, once terms of the sale are agreed upon. “Now we can easily identify these calls, where previously we were going through a very painful process: matching up manual reports with a time-stamp of recorded calls. Now pulling up those 25% of calls takes 20 minutes less per evaluation. This is a huge improvement from an efficiency perspective.”

Are these calls used for other purposes as well?
“Yes, they are used to evaluate agent performance, sales, and closing skills. We use NICE’s coaching package to deliver the evaluation with the recorded calls to the sales representatives and to the customer service group, which is also being evaluated.

“NICE actually helped us standardize our entire quality program and develop what that standard practice is going to be, to create a custom curriculum for training. No matter where the contact center was or which service it provided it would follow this model. Employees, agents, supervisors, managers, all the way up, all had to go through training.”

How has NICE helped standardize your quality program?
“We have new processes in place which were not possible without NICE Perform. For example, when a call is evaluated, a good evaluation is automatically signed off in NICE Perform by the evaluator and delivered to the agent. If the score was below the minimum threshold, then we can send a coaching package immediately to the team leader to review and do a one-on-one session with the employee, have the employee sign off on that, and then the package is forwarded to our agent after we’ve done the one-on-one, instead of going straight to the desktop.

“There are several benefits that we have realized, but haven’t quantified yet. Those benefits include reduced talk time, increased sales and cross sales, and the ability to identify areas where training programs can be improved, Eventually we expect to see fewer transfers, reduced call volume due to resolving root cause issues, and ultimately, improved customer satisfaction and loyalty.”

“By 2007, the whole quality process is going to be part of our corporate-wide scorecards, incorporating performance results from a number of different areas of the business, including quality and other call center metrics. It will also have scores on how efficient we were in handling the work, sales targets revenues, and more.”

You said that you also have IEX implemented. Where do you benefit from having NICE Perform and TotalView™ implemented together?
“We’re very excited about having TotalView integrated into the NICE dashboard; about seeing how the metrics of individual performance impacts enterprise strategy. For example, adherence to schedule, which we can see through TotalView, can have a huge impact on level of service – which we see with NICE Perform. If the agent is out of adherence to schedule, up to four different individuals would have to be rescheduled. This impacts our average rate of answer and service level to our customers – if, for example, we’re rescheduled during peak times.  We have a target of having to answer within30 seconds, and have a less than 5% abandon rate. Only the NICE-IEX combination can help us identify and correct this kind of situation.”

“We’re very excited about having TotalView integrated into the NICE dashboard; about seeing how the metrics of individual performance impacts enterprise strategy.”